(photograph by Tim Page 1966)

(NB: Sean Flynn was son of actor Errol Flynn. He had a short career as an actor himself but later become a renowned photojournalist, going out in the field during the Vietnam War to take exceptional pictures. He is mentioned in Michael Herr's book Dispatches. He went missing in 1970 after setting off with fellow journalist Dana Stone. They were headed for Cambodia and were never seen again.)

A Hollywood golden boy is not supposed to die in the cloying heat of the jungle, sweaty and dirty and captive. The hero gets to ride off in to the sunset. There are no guerrilla factions in the storybook and a fight to the death is done with the utmost honour and always with a quip, not blood and guts and tears.

Sean Flynn was an icon in an iconic moment of human history. To me he is symbolic of the microcosm that was Vietnam, the epicentre of what the Historian Richard Polenberg called the "American Earthquake." The son of a screen great, an idol to middle America. Errol Flynn's boy, cutting a dash and saving the woman. Defending good and protecting against evil. The American dream. How the hell did Sean Flynn end up crawling in the mud of Vietnam, taking photographs dropped out, strung out and stoned.?

Perhaps to anxious parents at home he was the mirror they held up to their lives. A glorious boy who's life was snuffed out too soon. No wooden box for him though. No solemn flag folding. No dog tags and body bags. He was the tragedy that normal Americans suffered day after day after day.

Perhaps he was the symbol of everything that had gone bad and wrong in America. Expectations turned on their head. To some there were no more clear lines between right and wrong, opression and freedom, truth and lies. Poverty, racism, sexism, liberty. These ideals exploding and spewing out dissent all over the American public's clean linen.

Perhaps he is the ultimate counter culture hero. The man who bucked against the expectations of a nation. A cat from Frankie's House sticking a dirty finger up at everything he was supposed to be and melting away in to the music, the chaos and the trip, lost in a purple haze of ganja and gun smoke.

I don't know if he's none of those things or all of them. He's fascinating. He captivates. In Tim Page's iconic photograph there is a distinct sense of both peace with the world around him and an imposing feeling of sadness. Did he suspect that he wouldn't make it, like so many reporters and photographers and was he ready for it? Was he a thrill seeker who stupidly placed his life on the line, out there for all the wrong reasons?

Some like to imagine he's still out there somewhere and maybe, like the movies, he'll turn up dazed and confused and wondering where the last thirty yeasrs went. Or maybe he'll be drinking next to you in some backwater bar, name changed, enjoying the anonymity of a quiet life, a lifetimes worth of wild times spent in Hue turned to stories that he keeps to himself with a secretive smile as he denies your suggestion that he's that film star's son.

Here's the ironic thing. He got his Hollywood ending. The silver screen son rode off in to the sunset, this much is true. He'll stay young and beautiful forever, a closing credits death. Living the wild life and burining out in the blaze that was Vietnam.